The mechanics of warfare: Weapons

Edit: The main weave of conversation follows the outline in my second post and explains the details of 3 main points. If you don't feel up to hacking the walls of text that is just fine. In between those posts there is much conversation so feel free to join in.

Part 1 is the intro and can be found in the next post.

Part 2 is now up, conveniently at the top of page 2. It continues part 2 and introduces our mock battle.

Part 3 is in post #45 on the second page. The battle is heating up nicely.

Part 4 is at the top of page 3. A bit short compared to the rest, introduces new units.

Part 5 is in post #85 on page 4. Gives more detail about the new units, next up is the fight.

So, lets talk about weapon mechanics! This thread is not just for me to ramble on. If you see a discrepancy, feel that I am missing something or just have something to add, speak up! The mission of this thread as stated here is: to help us as players teach each other how realistic weapons function and most importantly, ask each other how realistic we want the weapons to be in our games.

To be perfectly clear this thread is about how weapons work. Later on we can start a master list of each weapon we would like to see and the particulars of each.

With the plans for a modular unit design system in the works its apparent that we as players are going to have a lot of choices to pick from. Its easy to provide the developers with a list of weapons that you would like to see in game. But first you must ask yourself if you really want a gigantic selection of choices, most of which a highly redundant. In a statistical sense does it really matter if the developers include katanas, zwiehanders and kopeshi if all of them just end up as Swords with a varying attack strength?

In a word, yes. All of those might be swords in that they share the features of sharp edge and a handgrip. But each weapon has a unique identity that makes it perform differently in combat. If you take the time to include these differences what you end up with is a much more realistic game with choices that affect your gameplay rather than being simply cosmetic. This is what most people would call adding depth to the game. To do this you do not have to detail every single weapon down to the last inch. Instead you must understand and quantify the mechanics that make each weapon work the way it does in real life and should in a computerized setting. If I arm my soldiers with halberds I want that to mean something. Halberds should not be just another spear with a +2 bonus against horses.

It is possible to add complexity to RPS. Try best out of 5 rules. Or even best out of 10. That is what we wan't to accomplish here. Pikemen beat cavalry, unless the cavalry have bows, but then the pikeman have heavy armour and shields, then the cavalry ambush them, but the ground is trapped. See what I mean?

There are counters and counter-counters and counters to counter-counters. The point is, one side loses because the other guy beat him. NOT because he lost a simple abstracted game of dice.

--

Just to start off, an engineer could explain this much better than I could (and in fewer words), but unfortunatly I am not an engineer so bear with me. (if you didn't notice already I am not an english major either, heh)

So we left off at crushing weapons. Unlike the other kinds, crushing attacks are hard to define. A hammer and a flanged mace are both considered crushing weapons but the flanged mace can cut weak materials where the hammer would flatten them. Technically speaking any weapon attack that hits armour it can't penetrate is transformed into a crushing attack.

What sets crushing weapons apart is the intention behind thier design. One very important factor of any weapon is its balance. You often hear people describe swords as well balanced. What this means is that the swords center of balance is inside the grip of the sword, or close to it.

To demonstrate this concept try this simple experiment. Find an object in your house about 3 feet long and thin enough to hold in your hands. A piece of wood or a length of pipe works well. Pick it up and hold it at the very end with both hands. Wave this object around in front of your face so that the tip moves in a figure 8 shape. Even if you find a relatively light object this will take considerable effort because you constantly have to prevent the far end of the object from dropping towards the ground. Now balance the object on your palm to find its center of gravity. Hold the object at that spot but this time use one hand. Now wave the object around in the same figure 8 pattern. If the object you selected is too light then this won't work as well. Try more advanced movements such as stopping suddenly during the figure 8 and reversing direction or writing words in midair.

Even though the weight of the object has not changed, holding it near the center changes its performance dramatically. Having the object well balanced in your hand will make it much easier to move and manipulate the orientation of the object. This attribute is very important for weapons like swords. The balance of crushing weapons is always near the very tip of the weapon. By holding it far from the center of balance we require much more energy to accelerate the weapon. This effort is not wasted however, because when we hit something with the weapon it applies this energy en mass.

Where other weapons like swords multiply the force of your attacks by concentrating them over a small area. Crushing weapons multiply the force of you attacks by greatly increasing the amount of energy you can apply with them. Even if the weapon in question is designed to concentrate its damage into other forms such as a spiked flail. The design of the weapon is still based on mass energy transfer and this is the defining trait of all crushing weapons.

--

So now you all have a good grounding on the mechanics behind damage in its different forms. Its quite possible that you now understand the meaning of point #1, damage is not just a number. So far we have only talked about applied force, the other half of the equation is recieved force, but well get to that when we talk about armour.

The challenge now is point #2. Something quantified can be simplified. All of this is far too complicated to put into a computer game (as you guys have repeatedly commented), unless said computer game had a science textbook as part of its content. Therefore the challenge is to simplify this information into a form that the player can understand and is useful to him.

The key here is that this is not simple information. This is information that has been simplified. Its okay now to categorize swords as "slashing weapons". At the same time as we make that statement, we recognize that most swords are used in a cutting fashion, and a heavy pommel can enable crushing attacks. What matters is that swords are effective at slashing attacks and all swords are capable of them. The little details are known and can be accessed when and if they become relevant.

--

How much information how fast is a question that you can only answer when people try to use your system. Since we don't have one I will simply have to make one up. This is an example of how we can pare down what a unit is against what you need to know about it and at what times.

So lets imagine that a mock battle is going on between me and an enemy. The enemy is a channeler who focuses on summoning spells, his force is a large group orcs armed with hammers and throwing axes. On my side of the board is a single unit of greatsword armed infantry. You the observer have played the game but have never encountered these units before so you don't know anything about them. Suddenly I cede control to you and you are now responsible for leading my soldiers.

The battle takes place in the middle of a lake frozen solid (by magic of course). Apart from a light dusting of snow the ice is completetly flat and clear, you can see all the way to the bottom of the lake. Both groups of soldiers are about 100 feet off from each other and converging at a walking pace.

Its obvious that combat is about to take place so the first thing you need to know is what you are dealing with and against. You mouse over the unit of greatsword armed infantry and a tooltip displays the name "Tamren's Honour Guard". "Tamren" in this case refers to me the channeler, instead of being a spellcaster I am more of a general who spends his magic on elite troops. My avatar is not in attendance at this time so my honour guard is fighting alone. Clicking on the group displays more info on the UI. A picture details one soldier from the group, beside his foot is the #7 indicating that there are 7 swordsmen in this unit. The highly decorated (and glowing!) border around the unit portrait makes it very clear that this is an elite unit, legendary in fact which is the maximum rank. The name of the unit is again displayed but under it is the subtext "human infantry". Listed on the UI is a little sword icon with the number 100 beside it. This is the abstracted attack strength of the unit. A little icon of a breastplate and shoulderpads has the number 60 and the word (heavy), this represents armour rating, again heavily abstracted.

Mousing over to the group of orcs the tooltip reads "Lev's Marauders" (orc infantry). The border around thier unit portrait is not complete and takes the shape of a single bronze chevron on the top. This means that the unit is rather unexperienced. Not much of a danger to our guard although the orc do outnumber them about 10 to one at 67 members in the unit. The orcs have an attack strength of 40 (the icon is a hammer instead a sword) which is nothing to laugh at, and they also have throwing axes with a strength of 10. The armour rating is listed at "light 10-20". Unlike my guard the orcs have crude mismatched armour, thus the variance in armour ratings.

Convinced that your soldiers are strong enough you tell them to attack the orcs. Your troops break into a jogging run and the orc respond by doing the same. You try to order your troops to charge instead but the order doesn't work and the button is blanked out. A bit of floating text pops up above your soldiers which reads "the ground is too dangerous sire". Going into your "army general" spellbook you find a spell called "sure footing". Casting this on your soldiers results in them breaking into a full run and thier feet glow momentarily. Upon close examination you see that they are now wearing cleats.

Both units are getting close to each other, the orcs are in a disorganized mob and the guard are running in a precise delta formation. The orcs let fly with throwing axes as soon as they get in range. The first 10 or so fall short but the orcs soon find the correct range and axes rain down on the guard. The delta formation breaks apart as the guard spread out to form a bigger target and dodge the missiles. The orcs aren't very good shots and only score 3 glancing hits, several axes are actualy parried out of the air by the guard (they are that badass). One lucky shot hits the knee of the soldier on the far left and trips him. Since the ground is made of ice he skids on his knee for a few paces before getting up and doesn't fall behind too much. The shower of axes seemed to be innefective but it did break up the guard formation. Unfortunatly the weight of experience is heavily in the guards favour. Without getting into too much detail the orcs get thier clocks cleaned and the 20 or so survivors retreat at a jog.

During the melee your soldiers got scattered a bit and take the moment to consolidate into a group again. They didn't escape unscathed as one of them now has a limp and all of them lost thier cloaks. (red of course). The orcs are now some distance away, about 100 feet. The enemy channeler suddenly makes his presence knows as lightning rains from the sky. The orcs are obscured by clouds of steam and when the steam clears you see that they are now riding wolves! Uh oh!

--

Now at this point the info you have accessed has been sufficient. You know that your guards are very experienced, and are equipped with powerful weapons and armour. You know that the orcs are inexperienced, weaker and armed with melee weapons and ranged throwing weapons. Combat doesn't require much more thought then "I need to tell my guys to go beat on the other guys". The terrain is flat and has no exceptional features other than being slippery.

At the same time your imput has been limited to move commands. The guards were smart enough to adopt a mob-breaking delta formation automatically. After the fight they consolidated automatically instead of chasing the orcs because they were not much of a threat. (not to mention that running on ice is dangerous even with cleats)

Combat so far has been pretty basic, but that will soon change. Stay tuned for part 3.

So perhaps there needs to be catagories of things to take into consideration.

For example: one catagory is of course is the equipment. One is the person. One is group formation. One is environmental... the list can go on

To speak about combat in general terms seems like trying to stuff a turkey into a chicken.... yea nice visual i know, but we should not try to tackle everything all at once. I think that would be a good start for the exellent suggestions flowing through this thread.

I have been suggesting ideas about games for quite a while now. In my experience the short focused discussion will more often produce people that agree with each other but very rarely will create useful information behind an idea. For example, you could say "I wan't magic swords" and everyone else could say "yes thats cool". The developer can't do much with this, all he knows is that we like shiny things, which he probably knew to begin with.

A better way of handling this is to have a very broad discussion among people who don't agree with each other on everything. This lets us simply foster discussion as a whole. Not simply discussions involving topics. Its a lot like fishing with nets. If you have read my other thread you would see how I rambled on in a random fashion. I started talking about patterns of growth for human populations, then transfered the talk about scale to small unit tactics and then landed on a semi argument on spears. That line of thought inspired me to start this thread where we are discussion something more specific, but still very broad.

So if you wanted magic swords in elemental, don't simply make a thread called "magic swords plz?", make one called "what would you like in your magic sword?" and invite everyone. One guy might prefer flaming swords, another magically sharp blades that glow. You personally might want swords made of magically hardened metal. All of them are magic swords, but each has a unique identity and what actually makes it magic is different. Instead of just adding "a" feature the game (+1 swords), we would be adding depth to the process of weapon creation.

Thanks for taking the time to write all this, it is fascinating. This is a good way to bring out ideas though I hope too many people don't just see wall-of-text and move on. I confess that I saw your first post in the dreamer thread and just moved on because I thought you were headed towards Elemental: The Reality Simulator (TM) But now I see that you do understand need for complexity management.

As you've pointed out, the model, however complex, has to be simplified for player consumption. There are other considerations to weigh in the addition of complexity:

- The developers have to be able to thoroughly grasp the idea. They're rather intelligent but this is a consideration as the level of understanding necessary to explain something to a computer is rather high.

- The computations involved have to "scale well" with large battles, i.e. cpu/memory performance. As long as you aren't building a Reality Simulator (TM) this is probably fine, but it can get out of control.

- The AI has to be able to deal with the additional complexity in such a way that they 1) don't do anything stupid and 2) make at least the occaisional smart decision. This could be the weakest point, as even Stardock's formidable AI talent didn't think the AI could properly handle tactical combat in GC2.

- The UI has to present the information, command-issuing elements, and decision support tools in a way usable, understandable, and *fun* to the average 4X gamer.

That said, I'd love it if I had a game that modeled all the stuff you've talked about.

As Frogboy has said in regards to another sytem which usually gets simplified (the production system), the simplification doesn't happen because people wouldn't understand it, but because it would consume a lot of calculation power of the computer itself and a lot of work of the developers to make it easily presentable to the player.

So I expect a quite complex battle simulation from StarDock presented on an intuitive UI for beginners on the game.

The player may not know against what armor flails are good but will soon learn that using flails in tight packed formations is a bad idea and untrained troops with flails suck but are good against shield bearers and plate armour.

Especially if the tool tip of the flail would read:

-good against heavy armor

-good against shields

-needs experienced troops

The veteran then could use that weapon for a specialised usage, while the beginner would be content to know that attacking heavy armored targets with flails is a good idea.

I repeat it again: An accurate and detailed "realistic" system leads to believable results that are easy to grasp.

Or as an anology: Reality is an unbelievable mess of physical calculations on a scale that isn't possible to simulate accurately on the best of todays computers, but you still understand the world around you easily, because while you don't understand the complexity behind everything you can understand the results of those calculations. And the nearer the simulations of those battles are to "reality" the easier it will be to understand them.

@vandenburg - Why do rock, paper, scissor systems suck? I think suspension of disbalief in a war of magic game isn't going to be harmed by a simple combat system. You touch bases on how not to over-burden new players with too much data via tool-tip, so thats good. But I don't think we should thumb our noses at a rock, paper, scissor system.

Maybe not limited to 3 types, since that is a very small and limited system, but the idea of "this easy to grasp concept is better against this other concept but weaker against a 3rd concept" is pretty straight forward and standard. I mean you almost promt a complex rock-paper-scissor system by giving things like Heavy-weaopn (flail) good vs. armored troops. Its the same idea as scissors good vs. paper.

Take WC3 for example, it's unit counter system is very arcane and abstracted; as a beginner I have no idea what works best against what. Take the Orc's rider. How should I know it's useful against buildings? Or against flying units thanks to ensnare? Or what is the counter to a human knight?

It's totally incomprehensible without careful study. It may be easy to grasp why something is strong against something else, but if you have a dozen different units on each side (to take a small number) those relations get very complicated very fast.

Of course my system is a RPS system in a way (each balanced system needs to somehow be one in the end). But the point I'm trying to argue is, that it's easier to see the effects of different kinds of weapons/units/whatever directly in a logical "realistic" way then to have to synthesize the theory behind it from an arbitrary and abstract system. But for a system to produce results which are understandable with our real world experiences and anticipations (real world can mean fantasy books and films) the system needs to model such differences between weapons and armor as accurately as possible.

The other problem with RPS is it's too simplified and that simplification removes tactical depth. Can you imagine how unfulfilling tactical combat in sins would've been most of the time in galciv 2? "You hit for 0 damage because you were stupid enough to arm your ship entirely with missiles" "He hits for 1 damage because he got lucky and picked mass drivers" Sure, spying can even things out some, but those are not fun battles because the system is so hard RPS.

The balance between strong enough to reward superior tactics and weak enough to reward good tactics is not a fine line. Units need situational strengths and weaknesses or else either the tactics or strategy will not matter nearly enough to the outcome of the battle to feel rewarding. The best example of this in the RPS system is swordsmen beating pikemen. What the hell! Pike absolutely dominated Eurpopean battlefields once it got worked out properly because of the effect of the wall of speartips a well drilled phalanx could present. However, catch it on the flank or unprepared, and they get eviscerated. If the commander of a pike army can get an army of swordsmen (rodelero style swords with some good mobility) in front of his pikes, he should win handily as the enemy gets buried under the weight of pike, instead of miraculously closing and killing the pikemen. The pikes shouldn't be very mobile, though, allowing the swords to hit their flanks, unless outmaneuvered badly. By creating a realistic setup, both the strategic victory of bringing swordsmen against pikes and the tactical victory of managing to avoid the pikes being outmaneuvered can be rewarded properly, while hard counters that don't rely on situational realism don't allow this. I'm much more fond of ability based counters than ones based on a simple multiplication of damage, because the multiplication is hidden from the user and doesn't reflect the complexity of the situation, even when it is obvious.

I think people are misunderstanding what I meant when I said I was pro-RPS as far as making the game fun without being overly complicated. I'm not trying to say 'Bah! Spears vs Horses yields Spears win everytime!1' but what I am trying to say is that this battle system (like every single other battle system employed in RTS and 4x games...) revolves around a system of hard and soft counters. Now this doesn't mean that the game should ignore every single aspect of the battle to yield the same results just because a particular unit is super effective against another.

In fact, the very notion that RPS negates tactics (as xthetenth suggested) is nonsense. If anything it forces the player to make tactical choices. If the player has an army that's heavy in calvary and is going up against an opponent with mostly polearm infantry, that doesn't mean the player should automatically lose. The player is going to be forced to use feint retreats to try and isolate the infantry so that the player can then charge in from the right angles and deal heavy damage to the infantry which is potentially tired from having to chase horsemen.

To many games use the RPS method, with little or no other factors even considered... Your earlier example in most games would play out as follows:7 swordsmen run into 67 orcs. Swordsmen and orcs stand around and whack each other til noone is left on the swordsmen side (since most games do not have experience implemented for normal footsoldiers). Orcs win due to superior numbers.

No tactics there, nothing done but 2 mobs running into one another with the bigger mob almost always winning. Any artificial limits or stats put onto units breaks any immersion you might have, and leads to more of those annoying 'WTF why did that happen??' moments. Units should be done a closely to real life as possible. If one thinks about the time spent modeling, texturing, and animating each unit type, implementing a good solid combat system with large amounts of under the hood features it is actually a very good use of time. A unit can be made to graphicly look photorealistic, but if he does not act in a way which at least imitates reality, the effort spent modeling, texturing, and animating that model were wasted.

- The computations involved have to "scale well" with large battles, i.e. cpu/memory performance. As long as you aren't building a Reality Simulator (TM) this is probably fine, but it can get out of control.

Scalability is the key point to all of this. I could explain the minutia behind each and every figure in every unit in my mock battle up top. But because the combat involves groups of people, these details become less and less relevant. That is not to say those details do not exist, but does it really matter if one swordsman out of 2000 is missing a finger on his left hand? If that one swordsman was my channeler in a one on one duel with another swordsman that would be a whole other story. You will see this kind of thing in action when I get to part 3.

The veteran then could use that weapon for a specialised usage, while the beginner would be content to know that attacking heavy armored targets with flails is a good idea.

I repeat it again: An accurate and detailed "realistic" system leads to believable results that are easy to grasp.

Detail can also make the system intuitive without hitting players in the face with a clue bat. Flails require a lot of room to be used effectively but you don't have to shove this fact down the players throat by making soldiers armed with flails simply lose when they get boxed in.

Lets say you had a unit of spearmen beside a unit of flailmen. You order both units to form "close ranks". The spearmen pack together until each man occupies a square a meter across. The flailmen on the other hand are much looser as each occupies a square twice that size. They refuse to come any closer to each other than that. In fact if you put them beside a wall and used the spearmen to box them in they would actually comment to you that they are too close together. (Ive got no room to fight now dolt! I mean sir!) In a fight you might zoom in to see that your flailmen are getting pushed back against a wall by other infantry. If you looked closely you mcould see that some of them have dropped thier flails and pulled out daggers to use instead.

I think people are misunderstanding what I meant when I said I was pro-RPS as far as making the game fun without being overly complicated.

Fair enough, I think I'd agree, I think we're promoting a rather similar thing from different viewpoints. I do think that viewing it from a perspective of representing reality and greater detail through the statistics and modifiers is conducive to more intuitive design than having gameplay statistics represented with objects from reality. A perfectly symmetric system may be very statistically elegant and nice from the perspective of game theory, but a representation of real systems will be more understandable despite the less 'clean' appearence from a statistic standpoint because it draws on people's knowledge of their world.

In fact, the very notion that RPS negates tactics (as xthetenth suggested) is nonsense.

Unfortunately, I think you misunderstood me as much as I did you, which is probably because my example was from an extreme standpoint to highlight my point and I did a terrible job of seperating rhetoric from point. I did not mean that RPS negates tactics, I meant instead that it does a very bad job of properly rewarding the successes of both good tactics and good strategy. In your example, you would need to do a very good job tactically or have your opponent do a terrible job to have a good chance. In my example (It was a pretty bad post, I must admit, I'll remember my caffiene next time), both units are good in melee, but the swordsmen are a soft counter to the pikes, so bringing them to the fight is a minor strategic victory. The pikemen can outweigh this with the major victory of striking entirely in their preferred aspect, which should see them win, or by striking most of the swords in a way that prefers the pikemen despite the lesser probability of this happening, that would roughly even out the advantage of the swords, as the pikes that get outflanked lose horribly and the swords that have to fight pikes head on do some damage but are largely defeated soundly. In this way of doing things the system makes sense, because the pikes project a barrier of spears in front of them to show how hard attacking them in this aspect will be, while in a more statistically driven system, such a detail could be lost. This way, the favorable outcome for the disadvantaged army is doable without huge mistakes on the opponent's part while still rewarding the army with the advatage. This is because on an individual squad basis there is a likely outcome favorable to the counterer and a considerably less likely outcome that favors the disdvantaged squad, allowing superior management on any scale to be rewarded, rather than if superiority on a macro and micro level simultaneously to favor the countered party (avoiding crucial weakness and outnumbering, because both possibilities favor the counterer, but one does so enough to overwhelm the advantage of outnumbering).

Alright, I think we're starting to understand one another better here, xthetenth and I see what you're saying and I didn't mean to sound like I wasn't supporting the idea of modifiers and tactics. What I was trying to say though is all things aside, RPS is a good base to a combat system. Earlier I mentioned the concept of trying to re-invent the wheel and by that I meant trying to create an entirely new combat system. By having RPS and the idea of both hard and soft counters, Stardock could then begin adding in other factors and modifiers to create a sort of realism within the game. That way, you go from just a wheel to an Audi TT or whatever you sports car of choice may be.

My only adversion is having too many modifiers that could potentially lead to 'WTF?' moments (like, and this is a terribly extreme case, my guys losing because the sun was in their eyes).

Well you could sum that up as "impaired vision", the unit in question would have a bleeding eye symbol above them to indicate the problem. It would also apply if they got sand in thier eyes or something like that.

Direct X 10 is capable of rendering "god rays" and you might have less of a top down perspective that allows you to see the burning sun in the distance. Graphics tech keeps rolling on and on so something like this happening isn't as unlikely as it sounds.

I didn't mean to sound like I wasn't supporting the idea of modifiers and tactics

and I didn't mean to sound like I wasn't supporting the idea of well-defined counters, be they soft or hard, I just suck at tone.

I'd say make all the modifiers readily apparent or not there. If it isn't relatively apparent, it isn't very likely to be important or obvious. For example, the flails, you could have a guy swing a flail around every once in a while to show the problems that would cause for spacing. Or going back to the pikes, the frontal awesomeness would be pretty apparent from the fact that that facing looks like a hedgehog. Swordsmen with shields would similarly hold their shields up in the front rank to show their frontal defence. That kind of thing, where the appearence of the unit and the function go hand in hand is what I'm looking for. Pikemen are in a big block, so they're slow to move and/or turns take twice as much movement.

Yeah exactly. You know its a flail, it looks like a flail, works like a flail and hurts like a flail. It is not simply a picture of a flail with the number 10 beside it. Simple things can convey this to the player. Idle animations are a good one. Troops with nothing to do and no enemy in sight will do things like stretch and take practice swings with thier weapons. Flailmen standing in formation are spaced far apart, when they take practice swings they cover a lot of ground. More tellingly, nearby friendly soldiers will take a step back!

Progress! I now have an outline in my mind for the third "half". I must admit I thought this "gamer thesis" would only take me two posts to write out. But as Tolkien once said, the tale grew in the telling, and you guys are awesome for carrying it this far. I can only describe some of my previous discussions as trying to clear a minefield with a baseball bat.

Before I continue with the main weave I want to catch up on a few loose threads I didn't have time for.

- The developers have to be able to thoroughly grasp the idea. They're rather intelligent but this is a consideration as the level of understanding necessary to explain something to a computer is rather high.

If the developer or any of you run into an idea or a concept that you do not understand the most important thing to do is comment on it. A lack of understanding always has a root cause be it lack of information or a flawed method of explanation. Any and all attempts to rectify the situation can only result in a better explanation or better information. An idea is a road that leads to an understanding and you all know how much we hate to ask for directions!

Take WC3 for example, it's unit counter system is very arcane and abstracted; as a beginner I have no idea what works best against what. Take the Orc's rider. How should I know it's useful against buildings? Or against flying units thanks to ensnare? Or what is the counter to a human knight?

I had the same problem. When you get down to it the system makes sense but it is not intuitive whatsoever. For example, armoured knights do normal damage and have heavy armour. Ranged units such as riflemen do piercing damage and have light armour. Normal damage does extra to light armour and piercing damage does extra to heavy armour. Most ranged units in wc3 do piercing damage and most melee do normal. Sounds simple enough doesn't it? The orcs have raiders who are wolf riders armed with big machete like swords. You would think that they do normal damage like the human knights, but instead they do siege damage. Siege damage does extra to fortified armour which is used on buildings and unarmoured targets who are usually weak support units.

How the hell was I supposed to know that a wolf rider armed with a sword does siege damage? Consider that the other siege units are things like catapults, giant bolt throwers and explosive mortars. Another confusing example is the night elf defensive building, a giant anthropomorphic tree that throws giant boulders which deal..... piercing damage? (gryphon rider throwing hammers also deal piercing damage, the list goes on)

--

Your system of hard counters can be perfectly balanced but it still forces players to dance by the numbers. Its this kind of confusion that we want to avoid with simplified complexity. I don't wan't to have to keep track of how 5 different damage types interact with 5 different types of armour. If I arm my soldiers with gigantic two handed warhammers, I want to see heads exploding when my soldiers fight on the battlefield.

No matter how complex your game gets, players who understand and appreciate the mechanics behind your system will understand it in all its permutations. When you fire up your first tutorial, I can teach you right off the bat the particulars of crushing damage and show you how crushing weapons perform in action on a variety of targets using a scripted teaching mission. From that mission forward you will understand the effects of crushing damage as a whole and what to expect when interacting with it.

Just imagine for a second the tactical depth we would have achieved in a game if you could influence the outcome of a battle by simply disguising the weapons of your soldiers as something else.

So when we left off we had a small group of elite human swordsmen staring down a group of battered inexperienced hammerorcs. The enemy channeler is starting to use his powers to strengthen his force.

After a lightning shower some wolves appeared on the battlefield. The first thing you notice about them is that the group of wolves and the group of orcs are seperate units even though they have combined into one unit of mounted infantry. Mousing over the wolves results in a tooltip that reads "Lev's Summoned Winter Wolves". Clicking on them displays more info on the UI. Instead of categorizing them as "wolf cavalry" they are instead "summoned creatures". What this means is that when you kill them they leave no body on the battlefield and the magic that summoned them is released into the enviroment. Since the wolves don't carry weapons they have an attack rating of 30 "bite" (which means piercing damage). For armour they have 30 "hide". There are 22 wolves in all. Beside the icon of a pair of jaws and the number 30 is another attack icon, this one a blue fireball superimposed over a snowflake. More on this later.

--

Not much has changed so far. The enemy has augmented his weak force with summoned mounts. If you ordered your guard to attack again you would probably win handily. However something doesn't taste right about the situation, the enemy channeler seems to consider this small unit of cavalry a more even match for your elite squad. Maybe there is something he knows that we don't? More information is needed.

The first thing you do is learn more about the enemy summoner. His magic is based on the realm of air, hence the lightning bolts that result from the use of his magic. (our magic is based on fire). You don't know many particulars about his abilities but being a channeler you can sense that he just spent a considerable amount of magic to bring these wolves here and that he has much left in reserve. Both of us are very powerful channelers and a simple thing like spawning a score of wolves on the battlefield should be relatively cheap as far as magic goes. There must be something special about them.

--

Going back to the unit of winter wolves we bring up the unit interface. Since I can't draw pictures we'll have to imagine this is a bit like the unit interface from MoM. The interface is a series of boxes which display different categories of information. The first one at the very top contains much the same information as what we had on the main UI. The rest of the boxes go into more detail about things like equipment and the individual members. Some boxes like the one that details unit history are missing since this is a summoned unit. Other boxes which are relevant but empty are greyed out and displayd as a line.

The second box is filled with the most relevant combat related information, it has a list of 4 icons. The first is of a wolf head with the jaw and fangs displayed prominently, the second is of a white dragon head breathing a plume of blue fire superimposed over a snowflake, the third is a scarred patch of white fur and the fourth is of a horse showing the back of the horse at an angle. Mousing over these icons provides more detail about each:

The first icon is labeled "bite attack". Bite attacks do piercing damage but what makes them special is that once a bite attack is made, the attacker doesn't have to let go! A wolf that bites you on the arm can continue to rip and tear until you either dislodge it or your arm falls off in the wolf's jaws, at which point it can bite you again.

The second icon is labeled "breath attack", the colour and background symbol indicate that it is cold based. These winter wolves are a lot more dangerous than they appear! Each is capable of blasting a jet of intense cold, much like a flamethrower. Breath attacks combined with bite attacks are particularly dangerous because they can be used at the same time. (its worth noting that not all breath attacks work like a flamethrower, "breath attack" simply means that something unhealthy comes out of your mouth, this can be anything from a gout of corrosive stomach acid to a jet of lightning)

The third icon is labeled "hide armour". Hide armour as a type represents the tough skin of animals. In this case the hide also has fur, but the hide of other creatures like crocodiles and dragons would have scales. Fur is an important weakness which we can exploit because it is vulnerable to fire.

The fourth icon is labeled "unsaddled mount". This indicates that winter wolves can be ridden like horses and other animals. However the lack of a saddle is a key weakness, your seat is less stable and it is harder to control where you want the mount to go.

The next box down displays the individual members of the unit, 22 in all. Each wolf is represented by a wolf head icon, some are larger than others and a few have silver and bronze borders. These animals are summoned so they do not have individual histories nor measured levels of experience. However some wolves are naturally tougher than others and repeat summoning of the same wolf will essentially tame it to your service so long as it survives to be dismissed.

The bottom box details misc abilities and other details. If this was a unit of basic human soldiers its possible that this box would be empty. Winter wolves are considerably more exotic and this box is filled with many icons. A selection of the most relevant:

Attack mount: Mount is capable of its full range of attacks even when carrying a rider. An elephant for example can crush an enemy by rolling on top of it, but they could not do this if they had riders aboard.

Arctic Biome: Winter wolves are right at home in cold environs. They are also well equipped to be running on ice which makes them practical mounts on this battlefield.

Untamed: While the restrictions imbued by your magic force these wolves to obey you, they are still wild at heart and may not be entirely predictable.

--

Its apparent now that we may have underestimated these magic animals. Perhaps we have underestimated the orcs as well? Pulling up the unit interface for the orcs confirms that these orcs are a lot stronger than we assumed. For starters the unit is now elite, when we beat the crap out of the unit the first time, all we did was to remove all of the weak inexperienced members from the group. What is left is a core of grizzled soldiers and the average level of experience has risen a couple of notches. Whats more is that these orcs have powerful mounts, combined the two are a good match for one of our guards and they outnumber them 3-1. Powerful as the enemy unit is, our guards are titans in experience and there isn't much doubt that they could defeat the wolf riders given time. However its doubtful that they could do this without losses.

--

For the sake of demonstration lets say you watched the enemy channeler use his magic and thought "OH YEAH?". You went digging in my spellbook to find something good with which you can return fire. My channeler bases his power on fire and styles his magic towards supporting and empowering troops. Not as flashy as fireballs and lightning bolts but it does let me raise very powerful armies. Most of the spells in the book are designed to benefit large blocks of infantry and entire armies and would either be too expensive to use on this tiny unit of 7 people or wouldn't be compatible with this battlefield.

So skipping over to the page on individual unit spells you go right to the most expensive spell and cast it on the honour guard. The spell is called "IS THIS SPARTA?!" (custom content ftw) and the spell description simply reads "rofl". All 7 members of the guard suddenly burst into flame and double over laughing. When the flames die out each man has a new red cloak inscribed with the Delta symbol in blazing gold flames.

The orcs watching this from about 100 feet away aren't intimidated at all and begin taunting the guard. Your guards respond with rude gestures and one of them swings his sword in a decidedly freudian manner.

--

Now the battle is getting more complex. But you still had all the information that you needed. You know that the enemy wolves are a powerful force and have magical attacks. The remaining orcs are far more experienced than the rest and are riding those same mounts. In a fit of pique you have casted one of the most expensive spells in my book but you don't quite know what it does, it certainly hasn't had much of a visible effect and my channeler is running low on mana.

Please, oh please, please dear god, please don't do it like in GalCiv2.

When I research "HaxxOr Weapon 18" I want it to under all circumstances (except, arguably, expense/cost) be better than "HaxxOr Weapon 17" or "HaxxOr Weapon 15". Some would argue that the way it works in GalCiv2 is "intricate" or "advance", but when I have to look up weapon efficiency on a chart; my fun ends right there and then.

I'm all in favour of a rock-paper-scissor approach, but maybe with "paperclip" and "duck" thrown in there for good measure. That the paradigm shifts based on what weapon technology you focuse on is a given (so "scissor" may be cheaper and smaller than "duck", but "duck" punches harder, especially against anti-"paper" defense.

Isn't that the way it worked in Galciv 2? I've been playing a game over the past few days, and the more advanced my weapons get the smaller and more powerful they become. I don't see how advancing tech wise in galciv is bad for you in any way when it comes to your weaponry.

Isn't that the way it worked in Galciv 2? I've been playing a game over the past few days, and the more advanced my weapons get the smaller and more powerful they become. I don't see how advancing tech wise in galciv is bad for you in any way when it comes to your weaponry.

Hmm... I guess my playing style is such that I generally don't upgrade designs until my previous designs are hopelessly obsolete anyways. I'll send my guys into combat with Sherman style spaceships while my enemy is fielding Abrams simply because if it was good enough for them to start the war with it should be good enough for them to end it with too!

When I research "HaxxOr Weapon 18" I want it to under all circumstances (except, arguably, expense/cost) be better than "HaxxOr Weapon 17" or "HaxxOr Weapon 15". Some would argue that the way it works in GalCiv2 is "intricate" or "advance", but when I have to look up weapon efficiency on a chart; my fun ends right there and then.

If you implemented everything I talked about here into a game, there is no question that the data will fit into a chart of some sort. The question is, would the chart ever be needed? We would never know for sure unless we tried, but its my hope that they would prove to be unnecessary.